


Hurled Headlong Flaming

by depressaria



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Brainwashing, Community: hc_bingo, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-22
Updated: 2017-10-22
Packaged: 2019-01-21 08:43:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12453732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/depressaria/pseuds/depressaria
Summary: “You ran so far and so hard. Is there no comfort at all in finally coming home?”After Anna is recaptured by Heaven, Naomi is the one to assign her final mission.





	Hurled Headlong Flaming

**Author's Note:**

> For the ‘brainwashing / deprogramming’ square on my hc_bingo card. Title from Paradise Lost.

Castiel’s betrayal should not have come as a surprise, but somehow it did. Somehow she had thought him better than that. 

She took a certain amount of pleasure in that fact even as she was taken back to Heaven and thrown into a cell. Besides Gadreel, she was the only one there, which did not come as a surprise. Gadreel aside, the only angels who were ever imprisoned were doubters, and in Heaven rebellion came rarely if it came at all. 

Angels may not have been the creative torturers found in Hell, but they got the job done, particularly when their subjects weren’t masochistic demons. Time passed oddly in Heaven at the best of times—one reason why she had been grateful that her assignment didn’t require her to return very often—and the days blurred together into one long nightmare. 

Nothing compared to the physical pain of carving out her own grace or to the psychological pain of knowing she had to leave her life as a human, but they made a good effort. She wasn’t in the worst pain she’d ever had to endure, but it was still draining; there was a dull and pulsating ache at the core of her, as if her grace had been half-peeled away from her like a fingernail pulled away from a nailbed. Removing her own grace had been objectively more excruciating, but there was something profane about this torture that hacking out her own grace had lacked. That pain had been a necessary one, a way to free herself. This new pain was just an attempt for them to creep back under her skin, to try and ooze themselves back into her brain until they could force enough of her away from herself that she’d come crawling home begging to be part of the family again. 

This pain left smears of itself behind like stale grace left inside an abandoned vessel. 

She had almost resigned herself to the notion that they didn’t actually intend to execute her, that this would be her new normal, until the day when the door to her prison cell opened, and she was taken instead to a white room that looked more like an office than a torture chamber. 

They put her in a chair before the ostentatious desk that took up most of the room and then left, leaving her feeling rattled in a way that was probably entirely intentional. The result was that it took her far too long to realize that the angel seated behind the desk was Naomi. 

Fuck. 

As if somehow hearing the expletive, Naomi chose that moment to finally look up from the book she’d apparently been absorbed in. “Well,” she said. “You could not have picked a worse time for this little tantrum.” 

With the air of a disappointed schoolteacher trying to casually ease her way into a lecture, Naomi stood and walked around the desk only to plant her ass on it. The gesture was so strainedly casual, the body language accompanying it so typical of someone trying too hard to seem human, that Anna was reminded forcibly of a movie she’d seen on Earth when she was human and in college. _I’m not like the other torturers, I’m a cool torturer,_ she thought, and had to bite back a burst of disparaging laughter. 

“Is something funny?” Naomi asked. 

Only in the most warped sense of the term. 

“I just don’t know what you’re waiting for,” Anna said. It wasn’t exactly beyond an angel to be sadistic, but she would have thought that, given the current impending apocalypse situation, they would have been less wont to waste time.

“You ran so far and so hard,” Naomi said instead of answering. “Is there no comfort at all in finally coming home?”

“None,” Anna replied, and was surprised and grateful when her voice came out steady. 

Naomi nodded slowly. Thoughtfully reached out to tuck a strand of Anna’s hair behind her ear. “I could just reset you,” she said. “It wouldn’t be the first time I’d had to scrub the rebellion from your mind. But this would just happen again.”

“You’re right. I’ll never stop fighting you. Kill me if you’re going to kill me. Don’t drag it out more than you already have.”

“I can’t,” Naomi said. “It’s not up to me at this point.” She drew back almost regretfully, fingertips trailing lingeringly across Anna’s cheek before pulling away with seeming reluctance. There was something like pity in her eyes. “There is something special about you. I’ve been instructed to give you one last chance, but the specifics were left up to me.” 

Before she could ask what that was supposed to mean, Naomi’s many wings unfurled and—

Anna was back on Earth, her vessel whole once more, her mind clear. She had been here before, but this time she remembered. Remembered Castiel’s betrayal, the dungeon, the torture, the utilitarian white room. Remembered Naomi’s intense and earnest eyes, her warm but clinical hands, her true form settled bright and heavy behind her vessel with its deceptively soft face.

It was a gift, she realized. Perhaps the only comfort left that could possibly be given to her. Naomi could not (and did not seem to desire to) let her go, not without disobeying, but she’d sent her on her final assignment with enough willpower left that she was aware of what she had lost even as her wings carried her inexorably towards her fate. 

To a human, it would seem cruel. Anna was still human enough that the unfairness of it wasn’t entirely lost on her. But she also knew that humans were contradictory creatures, proclaiming ignorance to be bliss even as they accepted the apple and agreed, with their mouths full, that knowledge was power. Humans had been gifted from birth with free will, favored by their Father no matter what awful things they did with the gift He gave them. Humans existed simply to exist, to show off their Father’s skill, and while there was certainly something sad in knowing that they had no real higher purpose save perhaps their souls being destined to be turned into little more than cosmological diesel after the demise of their physical bodies, Anna still thought it sadder that angels existed only to carry out His bidding, no will of their own, no capacity to even mourn their lack of will. 

Wiping her mind completely, reverting her to factory settings, sending her on this fool’s errand with no inkling of the magnitude of her own sacrifice, doing to her the thing she’d hacked her own grace out to escape… that would be the real cruelty. 

Castiel thought she was misguided, or that she was in denial over what happened to her in Heaven, or maybe that she didn’t even understand the choice that had been taken from her. Of course she understood. She understood better than he did, had understood before it ever occurred to him that rebellion was an option. That was always the problem; she understood far too well what it meant to contemplate disobeying, what it meant to fall, to want to protect humanity more than her siblings’ interests. To be terrified of feeling that way, and to falter, so that in the end she wasn’t loyal to herself or to her Father and she felt all the worse for it. If anything, perhaps Castiel’s disobedience was nobler and less destructive than her own; he was still trying to protect the interests of their Father’s favorite creations. He was falling to protect humans. Anna had fallen because she hated her older siblings and wanted to be human. 

The Anna from before she’d been recaptured and reprogrammed would have done whatever it took to stop herself. Even the ignorant creature she’d been before she was human would have found a way to drag her feet until she could squirm out of the compulsion, even if it meant hacking off her own wings. 

But she wasn’t either of those people anymore. If she ever had qualified as a person, those days were gone. Naomi had made certain of that.

She closed her eyes and gathered her strength to visit 1978.


End file.
